https://www.nytimes.com/2021/02/21/science/saturn-titan-moon-exploration.html
Clouds of methane moving across the far northern regions of Saturnâs largest moon, Titan, in 2016. Video by NASA/JPL-Caltech/Space Science Institute/Univ. of Arizona
Out There
Seven Hundred Leagues Beneath Titanâs Methane Seas
Mars, Shmars; this voyager is looking forward to a submarine ride under the icebergs on Saturnâs strange moon.
Clouds of methane moving across the far northern regions of Saturnâs largest moon, Titan, in 2016. Video by NASA/JPL-Caltech/Space Science Institute/Univ. of ArizonaCredit.
Feb. 21, 2021
What could be more exciting than flying a helicopter over the deserts of Mars? How about playing Captain Nemo on Saturnâs large, foggy moon Titan â plumbing the depths of a methane ocean, dodging hydrocarbon icebergs and exploring an ancient, frigid shoreline of organic goo a billion miles from the sun?
by Theresa Machemer/Smithsonianmag.com
When NASA’s Cassini probe flew just above Saturn’s largest moon Titan while shooting radar at its surface, it was gathering data about the depth of the lakes across the moon’s surface. To figure out a lake’s depth, in theory, Cassini could measure when the radar hit the surface of the lake and then bounced off the bottom and reflected back to the probe. But when Cassini attempted this at Titan’s largest lake, its radar never reached the bottom, George Dvorsky reports for
The lake, called Kraken Mare, was either too deep or too absorptive for the radar to reach the lakebed. But by analyzing the data that Cassini gathered from shallower bodies of liquid, including a nearby estuary called Moray Sinus, researchers at Cornell University were able to tease out the lake’s depth. According to a paper published in
The largest lake on Saturn’s largest moon Titan may be deeper than a thousand feet. Even though it’s been more than three years since NASA’s Cassini spacecraft finished orbiting Saturn (when it dove down into the planet’s atmosphere), experts are still finding valuable information from the data that it collected.
In one of Cassini’s last flybys of Titan (specifically, the 104
th flyby of the moon on August 21, 2014), it was able to capture significant data of the moon’s largest lake called Kraken Mare. Based on preliminary data, it was believed that the lake was at least 115 feet deep but according to more in-depth analysis, it has been revealed that it is much deeper – at least 1,000 feet. In fact, it is so deep that the radar on board the spacecraft couldn’t probe all the way down to the bottom of the lake.
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It has recently come to light that Cornell scientists have estimated that âKraken Mareâ, a sea of liquid methane thatâs located on the Saturnâs largest moon, Titan, is at least 1,000 feet deep near its center. The details of the findings have been published by the researchers in âThe Bathymetry of Moray Sinus at Titanâs Kraken Mare,â study in the Journal of Geophysical Research.
As
reported by Cornell Chronicle, researchers went through the data collected from one of the final Titan flybys of the Cassini mission. The spacecraftâs radar surveyed Ligeia Mare â a smaller sea in the moonâs northern polar region to discover âmysteriously disappearing and reappearing Magic Islandâ.